Hello, I’m Philip Hochstein, president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association. We represent construction contractors across BC, with approximately 500 located in the Lower Mainland.

The construction industry is concerned about the future of housing in the GVRD. We are concerned as business owners, as citizens, as parents and homeowners.

We are concerned about the homeless, we are concerned about the high cost of housing for our employees and for our children and we are concerned about how housing strategy affects our businesses and the thousands of high paying jobs we create.

As we all know, Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada in which to buy a home and there is seemingly no end in sight. The word crisis appears in almost every report on the subject and that’s what we are here to discuss.

I have read the Affordable Housing Strategy and it is a good piece of work that deals with many of the issues related to affordable housing.

But one that is missed and that I think always gets missed in this discussion is that of land supply for housing.

The basic tenet of economics and all markets is that demand and supply affect price. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up.

And that is exactly the situation we face in the GVRD. 

The question is why we can’t keep up with demand for housing. And the answer in many cases is that there simply isn’t enough land available to build housing on.

Not enough land to build on means not enough housing which creates an affordability crisis.  

But what about densification? Can’t we just get more people to live on the land currently zoned for housing?

That is certainly part of the solution and a strategy that our industry supports. But there is only so much that we can gain in that area. Let’s face it. We are not

going to squeeze another million people into Shaughnessy, Point Grey and West Vancouver.

The major piece of the puzzle that no one seems to be talking about is all the land that is currently zoned as unavailable for any type of development including housing.

Over seventy percent of the land in the GVRD, (that is s-e-v-e-n, z-e-r-o)  is designated as green zone of some sort or another. Transportation, housing, industrial, schools, hospitals and commercial compete for the leftover.

Within the huge chunk of the GVRD that is green zone, 21% or tens of thousands of hectares is in the Agricultural Land Reserve. Now the ALR was created to secure the food supply for BC, but thousands of hectares of ALR land is sitting vacant or in other uses like riding academies for the wealthy.

In Richmond last year a proposal to remove land from the ALR to build a density friendly mixed residential and parkland development on the Garden City lands was rejected and that huge swath of land remains vacant and locked up in the ALR doing no one any good whatsoever. That application had Federal, Municipal and Musqueam support and the land was never used for farming in the first place.

Agricultural Land seems to be a sacred cow in BC when housing debates arise. But the ALR is a thirty year old policy developed when disco was popular and BC barely registered on the political map of Canada.

Today, we have one of the fastest growing economies in the world, there are projections for hundreds of thousands more people moving into the Lower Mainland and the food security issues the ALR was premised on no longer exist.

Our industry believes it is about time that we at least began talking about the Agricultural Land Reserve to make sure it stills make sense for the 21st century.

We’re not talking about paving Stanley Park or even development on food producing land. We are talking about using idle land in the best way possible for the citizens of the the GVRD. Again picking on the Garden City Lands. Why couldn’t we look at a development with housing, businesses, parklands, public transit and all the other elements that define the triple bottom line of social. economic and environmental balance.

Building this kind of ecodense model community is much easier to do on a greenfeld site than in established neighbourhoods.

Part of what makes Vancouver one of the most desirable places in the world to live is the balance we’ve struck between forward-thinking urbanism, natural green spaces, and the amazing mountains and ocean surrounding the city. No-one wants to ruin that.

But we can’t build dense, sustainable housing without land to put it on. And we are quickly running out of it.  At the very least our industry believes it is time to begin a public dialogue about how critical supply of land is to the goal of affordable housing for the Lower Mainland population of the future.

*Speech presented on September 20, 2007 to the GVRD Regional Affordable Housing Strategy.